The body hit the concrete with a sound that would haunt the construction workers for the rest of their lives.
It wasn't loud—not like in the movies, no dramatic crash or thunder. Just a wet, final thud that seemed to swallow all other noise. For a moment, the world held its breath.
Then someone screamed.
Miguel Sandoval, foreman of the skeletal crew still working the site's perimeter, dropped his clipboard and ran. His boots pounded across gravel and packed earth, his heart hammering against his ribs. Behind him, two other workers followed, their faces already pale with the knowledge of what they were about to see.
They shouldn't have looked. They would wish, later, that they hadn't.
The boy lay in a spreading pool of crimson, his body twisted at angles that bodies weren't meant to bend. His limbs were wrong, shattered, bones pressing against skin that had split open in a dozen places. His head—God, his head—rested in a dark halo that grew wider with each passing second. Broken glasses lay a few feet away, both lenses shattered, reflecting the morning sun in fractured prisms.
"Call 911!" Miguel's voice cracked. His hands shook as he fumbled for his phone. "Call—Jesus Christ, call someone!"
Sarah Kim, the site's safety inspector, was already on her phone, her fingers trembling so badly she could barely dial. "There's been an accident—oh God, there's so much blood—the old Morrison site, yes, please hurry—"
More people were gathering now. A woman who'd been walking her dog stood frozen on the sidewalk, her hand over her mouth. A delivery driver had pulled over, was stepping out of his truck, his face draining of color as he registered the scene.
"Don't look!" Miguel shouted at them. "Stay back! Don't—"
The world stopped.
Not slowly. Not gradually. Just—stopped.
Sarah's voice cut off mid-word, her mouth still open, phone pressed to her ear. Miguel's hand froze mid-gesture. The woman with the dog became a statue, her dog suspended mid-bark, paw raised. A bird hung motionless in the sky, wings spread, defying gravity and physics and everything that made sense.
The wind died. Sound died. Everything died except the terrible stillness.
And the sun.
Oh God, the sun.
It changed.
The bright October morning sun darkened, its golden light bleeding away like water draining from a sink. It turned red first, then deeper—crimson, burgundy, rust. Then black. A perfect sphere of absolute darkness hanging in the sky, ringed by a corona of sickly light that looked less like sunshine and more like the last gasp of a dying star.
The air itself seemed to hold its breath.
Reality cracked.
It started small—a hairline fracture in the air itself, maybe six inches long, hanging vertical about three feet above Jhaeron's broken body. It looked like someone had taken a knife to the fabric of the world and cut a thin line through it. Through the crack, something else was visible. Not darkness. Not light. Something between, something other. A glimpse of somewhere else.
The crack grew.
It spread like ice across a windshield, splintering and branching, widening. The sound it made—if sound was even the right word for it in this frozen moment—was like crystal singing, like reality itself groaning under impossible strain. The crack stretched taller, wider, until it was easily eight feet high and five feet wide, a jagged tear in existence itself.
Through it, another world became visible.
Not Earth. Nothing like Earth.
The sky beyond the rift burned with colors that had no names—hues that existed between purple and gold, shades that hurt to perceive even frozen in this impossible moment. Structures rose in the distance, impossibly tall, impossibly beautiful, made of materials that seemed to be both solid and liquid, both matter and light. The ground—if it was ground—rippled like water but held firm like stone.
And she stepped through.
She had to duck slightly to fit through the rift, and even then, her presence seemed too large for this world, like reality had to shift and adjust to accommodate her. She was easily seven feet tall, perhaps taller, with proportions that were almost human but subtly, undeniably wrong. Her limbs were too long, too graceful. Her joints bent at angles that suggested more flexibility than human anatomy allowed.
Her skin was white—not pale, not ivory, but white like porcelain fresh from the kiln, like marble, like fresh snow under moonlight. It seemed to glow with its own inner luminescence, as if light lived just beneath the surface.
But it was her face that would have stopped hearts if any hearts had been beating.
She was beautiful in a way that transcended human beauty, in a way that made the word "beautiful" seem inadequate and crude. Her features were sharp but perfect—high cheekbones, a straight nose, lips that curved with an expression somewhere between sorrow and rage. Her eyes were too large, too bright, the color of molten gold, and they held an intelligence and ancientness that pressed against the mind like weight.
Her hair fell past her shoulders in waves of pure silver-white, moving despite the frozen air, flowing like water, like smoke, like something alive.
She wore robes that seemed woven from gold and cream, fabrics that shifted and changed as she moved, patterns appearing and disappearing across the material like living tattoos. The robes left her arms bare, and more tattoos covered her skin—intricate designs that spiraled up from her wrists, across her forearms, her biceps, her shoulders. They continued across her collarbones and down her chest, disappearing beneath the neckline of her robes. The tattoos weren't quite black—they were every color and no color, shifting like oil on water, like they were written in light itself.
She moved with impossible grace, each step flowing into the next, and as she walked toward Jhaeron's body, the frozen construction workers might as well have been statues. She didn't even glance at them. They didn't matter. Nothing mattered except the boy bleeding on the concrete.
She stopped beside him, towering over his broken form. Her golden eyes swept across his injuries, and her perfect face twisted with something that might have been anguish.
"What have they done to my poor boy?"
Her voice resonated in the frozen air, carrying harmonics that human vocal cords couldn't produce. It was one voice and many voices, speaking in a language that wasn't quite language, yet the meaning was perfectly clear. Each word seemed to vibrate in the chest, in the bones, in the soul.
She knelt—a fluid, boneless motion—and raised one hand over Jhaeron's body. Her fingers were long, delicate, tipped with what might have been nails or might have been talons, hard and sharp and pearlescent.
Light poured from her palm.
Not harsh. Not blinding. Soft and warm and the color of sunrise, of hope, of every good thing that had ever existed. It flowed over Jhaeron's broken body like water, like honey, seeking out every wound, every fracture, every torn vessel and shattered bone.
His body began to change.
The pool of blood retreated, flowing backward, impossible, returning to veins that sealed themselves shut. Bones shifted, grinding back into place with sounds like trees growing, like ice melting, like the world breathing. Skin knitted itself together, tears closing, bruises fading from purple to yellow to gone. His twisted limbs straightened, repositioned themselves with gentle clicks and pops.
His face reformed. The swelling around his eye vanished. His split lip sealed. Even his glasses, lying broken nearby, reassembled themselves—the shattered lenses flowing back together like mercury, the bent frames straightening until they looked brand new.
In less than thirty seconds, Jhaeron Halden looked exactly as he had that morning before Marcus Chen's fist had ever touched him. No blood. No bruises. No signs of the devastating impact that should have killed him instantly.
Except he wasn't breathing.
The woman's expression shifted to something darker. Her hand moved from hovering to touching, her palm pressing against his chest. Light flared again, brighter this time, sinking into his sternum, into his heart.
Jhaeron's body jerked. His chest rose with a sharp, sudden breath. But his eyes didn't open. He remained unconscious, pale, suspended in whatever place the dying go before they're pulled back.
The woman stood in one fluid motion. As she rose, so did Jhaeron's body, lifting from the concrete without being touched, floating as if invisible strings held him. He drifted upward until he was level with her chest, his body horizontal, suspended in the air like a magician's assistant, arms hanging limp, head tilted back.
She turned, looking in a specific direction. Her golden eyes focused on something distant, something beyond the frozen workers and stopped traffic and the entire paralyzed town. Her perfect features hardened with an expression that might have been determination or might have been fury.
She spoke again, not to anyone present, but to someone or something far away. The words weren't English, weren't any Earth language. They rolled and crashed like waves, like thunder, carrying meaning that the frozen humans couldn't comprehend but could feel—a declaration, a challenge, a promise.
Then she walked back toward the rift, and Jhaeron's floating body followed as if tethered to her by invisible bonds. He drifted through the air behind her, still unconscious, still pale, still so terrifyingly fragile compared to the being leading him away.
She reached the crack in reality and stepped through without hesitation. Jhaeron's body followed, floating across the threshold between worlds. For just a moment, both were visible through the rift—the tall, impossible woman and the small human boy—silhouetted against that alien sky with its nameless colors.
Then the crack began to close.
It sealed itself the same way it had opened, starting at the edges and working inward, reality stitching itself back together with that same crystalline singing sound. The glimpse of the other world grew smaller, narrower, until it was just a line, then just a point, then nothing at all.
The sun blazed back to golden normalcy.
Time resumed.
"—please, he's just a kid, he's—" Sarah's voice continued from exactly where it had stopped, no awareness of the pause. Her eyes widened. "Wait. Where—"
"What the hell?" Miguel stumbled forward, staring at the empty concrete where, a second ago (to him), a boy had been dying. "Where did he—there was—he was right there!"
The concrete was clean. No blood. No body. No broken glasses. Just empty gray stone still damp with morning dew.
"I saw him fall," the woman with the dog said, her voice high and shaky. "I saw—there was blood, so much blood—"
"I saw it too," the delivery driver said. He was shaking, his phone out but forgotten in his hand. "He hit the ground. I heard it. He was—how is there nothing here?"
More people were arriving now, drawn by the commotion. Someone said they'd seen a body. Someone else said they'd seen a boy on the roof. The workers were talking over each other, pointing at the empty concrete, at the building above, trying to make sense of what they'd seen or thought they'd seen or couldn't possibly have seen.
"Maybe it was... I don't know, a mannequin?" Sarah's voice was uncertain, desperate for a rational explanation. "Some sick prank?"
"That wasn't a mannequin," Miguel said flatly. "I saw his face. That was a real kid."
"Then where is he?" Sarah gestured at the empty ground. "Where's the blood? Where's anything?"
Silence fell over the group. They all stared at the concrete, at each other, searching for answers that didn't exist.
"Did anyone else feel..." the dog walker started, then stopped, shook her head. "Never mind. That's crazy."
"Feel what?" the delivery driver asked.
"Like everything just... stopped. For a second. Like the world held its breath." She laughed nervously. "Told you it was crazy."
But several people were nodding, uncertain, unwilling to admit they'd felt it too. The impossible pause. The darkness. The sense that reality itself had shifted in some fundamental, terrifying way.
Miguel pulled out his radio. "I'm calling this in. Even if there's no body, someone was up there. Someone fell or jumped or—something happened."
But even as he made the call, even as police sirens began to wail in the distance, everyone standing around that empty concrete knew the truth in their bones:
Something impossible had just occurred.
Something that couldn't be explained or rationalized or fit into any framework of normal reality.
A boy had fallen. A boy had died.
And then he'd simply ceased to exist, taken by something—or someone—that had torn a hole in the world itself to claim him.
Above them, the October sun shone bright and normal and utterly indifferent.
And somewhere else, somewhere beyond the boundaries of this world, Jhaeron Halden floated in darkness, unaware that his life had just changed in ways he couldn't begin to imagine.
Unaware that his death had been witnessed by more than humans.
Unaware that his real story was only just beginning.